Sorry, kids. No time for a big post, but here’s a poem I wrote about resident bacterial/viral flora to tide you over.

Civilisation
That’s what they call it
We live
In the plains, in the valleys, in the walls
Stigmatised
As disease-causers and bloody anarchists
Innocent life
Almost unnoticed by the self-appointed Empire

Keep the poetry talent up your sleeve for later! I’ve kept my inner pernickitty-pedant alive and well so I can make a few cents as an editor, now that I can’t make anything from the field I trained for!
Incidentally, I’ve found that playing the online protein-building games FoldIt and Eterna have helped me understand the mutations that might make E coli unfriendly, eg. when it went nuts on the bean sprouts in Germany. Since I’m just a victim of arrested biology (ie. in the non-medical stream of public health), the games make me understand much faster than reading textbooks!